


Orbit

by Avarres (Cotta)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-10 00:26:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4370123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cotta/pseuds/Avarres
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To not know is foreign to you. To not be able to look through thousands upon thousands of files, servers and records is strange and frightening. But he is even more so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Orbit

You stare out the large pane of glass, towards a planet you know is contested territory without even having to ping it in your sensory system, and numbly lift a hand to cover it with your hand. Your fingers twitch and cramp up as you try to trace the contours of the faintly luminescent planet, your fine motor skills are far from properly developed, and you’re not sure why you feel cold when you look at them. They’ve forgotten how to move properly, and the scabs that cover the surgical cuts over your knuckles are itchy. You shouldn’t even be able to move them, because you didn’t need them to function as a Helmsman; the joints were optimal for smaller biocable insertions though, and had been frequently used as such.

For some reason you’d been free from the wires and the machinery long enough for your body to awkwardly knit itself together into some semblance of proper anatomy, but you still weren’t working like a normal troll should and you didn’t know if it’s out of spite or simple curiosity that they’ve let you keep your eyes, because those are about the only thing on you and in you that has served you somewhat unfailingly during your time.

You should hate it, the way that the parts that make you up aren’t considered yours to own nor keep, but you can’t muster up the energy to do so. You spent it all on the first sixty sweeps, where you’d loathed and feared so many things, had felt so much grief and anger that the pain had become secondary. Until that too had been taken from you and the agony was all there was to fill the void.

Fifteen sweeps, that was how old you’d been allowed to become. Fifteen sweeps of nothing but struggle and peril, running from slave masters and into a rebellion that had ended in slaughter and the death of so many undeserving souls. After that came this, came darkness and pain and a shrill laugh that could make you shudder and freeze with horror even when you knew it was just all in your head. Fifteen sweeps had led to this, to eons and eternity of servitude. You don’t feel particularly sad about it anymore. It just is.

The glass is cool, like everything else in this too-large hive that you don’t fit into, but it’s still a sensation you can relate to. You entertain the thought of finding it funny that you’ve probably been the coldest warmblood in history, but it’s not actually making you smile so you let the thought echo out in your pan. Besides, the troll owning the hive wouldn’t want to find you smiling, you think. Or maybe he would. Who the fuck knows?

What you do know is that the planet out there has a scheduled annihilation in less than thirty-six hours, that the engines will blast you through space and into it’s immediate proximity with the pinpoint precision that you have perfected and programmed through the sweeps and that the cannons on the left side will fire exactly 0.0002 seconds after the one’s on the right to not completely offset the ship’s balance. Your twitchy fingers tap against the glass, as if wanting to touch the planet that will fall to Her Majesty next. You are not the one that will bring about their doom this time, there is a substitute in the helmsblock that will provide the firepower, and for that you think you should feel grateful, but the feeling is so foreign to you that it almost makes you do a quick search through a subserver that you’re not hooked up to anymore, and before you understand that you are only _you_ now it makes your sponge ache.

The surreal feeling of your toes against the floor is what keeps you rooted to the spot a little longer, and your red and blue eyes cast strange reflections of you on the window. Your eyes are sunken in and ringed with thin, almost-invisible scars, but besides the cluster of pale marks by your temples your face is still looking like it did when your friends were executed for their hopes and beliefs. Only less alive. You grimace and see your skin stretch almost painfully tight over your cheekbones, and you look disgusting. More like a walking carcass than a troll, and how others can still find the urge to touch you is beyond comprehension. Thankfully you don’t have to look at the scars covering the rest of you; the clothes that you’ve been given are long-sleeved and big on you, but you don’t think your caretaker gave them to you with your comfort in mind. More likely because it was the first thing he found to throw at you to stop you from disturbing him. You don’t know why he brought you here, other than that you asked him to, nor do you understand his intentions.

He has yet to harm you, which is unnatural and frankly speaking very unnerving, but you know he can. A hesitant smile stretches your dry lips over a fang, because you know he can be manipulated into the famed purpleblooded rage and then surely you’ll be the first to get culled. You only hope for it to be relatively quick.

The moons of this planet are smaller than you think the Alternian moons were, but you’re not sure. There’s a lot you don’t remember, and you have no backlog or memory files stored away with such unprofitable information, so when your own useless sponge vaguely informs you that yes, the moons of your home planet were in fact bigger, you have no hope for it to ever be proven right or wrong. You try to make your fingers do what you want them to, like they did a long time ago when you could still hold things without either breaking them or dropping them, and place your index finger over the smallest moon. It seems like such a waste that it’ll all disappear into deep space before it has even reached a mature cycle.

“Seems a motherfucker can’t leave you to your own miraculous devices for a minute, lowblood. You ain’t supposed to be out here. Or are you trying to run from me, sparkfly?”

You know the booming voice coming from somewhere behind you, you’ve had time to get used to it without cringing as it makes you deaf for anything but the growls and crackles of voodoo, the blue and red glow from your eyes making it difficult to pinpoint the much bigger troll in the glass reflections. You shake your head silently. You’re not trying to run. Maybe if you were younger, or had something to run _to_ , you would consider it. But your place has been eradicated, the world no longer holds a slot for the you that once was, and instead you are left adrift and unwanted in a void created by cruelty and the bane of your blood colour. When you were younger, only a few sweeps past wrigglehood, you’d raged at this fate and the injustice of it all. But now you know better. It’s not unjust. It simply is.

“You ain’t gonna all up and answer me properly?” The voice isn’t even coming closer, isn’t even sounding like the owner of it is mad at you at all. It sounds like it always does. Unpredictable, mirth dancing unbidden through the words and lacing them with dark chucklevoodoos.

You have come to understand that the new owner is fond of making you comply to his whims, but has never actually forced you to do anything particularly hurtful or humiliating. That wasn’t saying that the highblood wouldn’t make you do things you didn’t want, or goaded you into submitting to him sometimes, but it hadn’t escalated past words or the sporadic rough handling. Not like Dualscar and his ilk, with less words and more pain. And never like _Her_.

Your owner wants an answer out of you, seems to like when you speak and react to things, but you have very little to offer him at the moment. Sometimes you actually want to please him, and the thought makes you feel ill with self-loathing and disgust afterward, but he has caught you at a bad time. Sometimes reality crashes against you far too vividly and with much more force than you can take. So you remove your struggling fingers from the smooth surface, silently wishing you weren’t ashamed of just how disfigured and broken you had become in front of him, and open your mouth to speak.

“What doeth the moonth look like?” The aggravating lisp is still there, you ought to have that bug fixed with the next patch installment, and your voice sounds raspy and unused even to your own ears. You stopped talking to yourself a decade or so ago, because the sound of your voice made you feel even more alone. Now it feels strange and foreign in your mouth.

There’s a slow, deliberate chuckle behind you. “What was that, little chucklefuck?”

“The moonth. The oneth back on Alternia. What do they look like?” You watch the planet float in the black abyss and wonder briefly how many of those you’ve destroyed over the centuries. You ears slowly perk up and pull in close to your skull to save warmth, hating how confused you are without being the ship. How frail and small you seem to be, even though this is what you really are. Fighting alongside Signless and his rebellion never made you feel this way. “I’ve forgotten.”

There’s a strange kind of silence before you hear big feet shuffling closer, and perhaps it’s now the first real damage will come to you. Perhaps it’s now you will be reeled in and stripped of the little freedom you have been allowed to have, because no slave asked these kinds of stupid questions without being rectified.

“Ain’t much to tell. They’re moons, space-rocks hanging in the sky.” He sounds thoughtful, almost cautious, but you listen to him to regain some form of familiarity of the place where you were hatched and where your only friends were slaughtered. It was only fair you remembered what their tomb looked like. “Bigger than those pebbles out there. Different colours too, all up and having green and wicked purple glowing from their husks.”

For a moment you think you remember looking up at them, and it’s shockingly vivid to your mind’s eye, but then you loose the image and you’re left with blank space. You shake your head again, numb and lightheaded. What were you even doing out here in the first place? Why look at things you couldn’t change? Your whole life was filled with your prophecies and your vision twofold, things you could never stop nor do anything about. One would think you’d learn, but obviously you’re too stubborn to let go of certain things. “I thee.” You murmur out, feeling uncomfortably stupid and lost in the other trolls presence. Relapsing and falling into old habits have you force out a listless: “Thank you, mathter.” It’s customary, and you know it a little too well to not say. The title ‘master’ means very little to you anyway, it had lost its humiliating and degrading burn a long time ago.

A monstrously large hand is suddenly gripping your shoulder, shocking your skin with its chill, and it effortlessly pulls you away from the window. You feel energy build up at the base of your horns at the abrupt change, but your body has trouble enough as it is as it tries to keep up with the other troll hauling you towards the door into the inner chambers of the hive, and it fizzles and pops harmlessly in the air. He still doesn’t seem too angry, but his grip on you is like a vice as he pushes you in front of him.

A breathy growl and a sharp pang of voodoo’s, causing you to stumble over your uncoordinated feet, is what you get for not being fast enough. “Now, if this motherfucker ever sees you out here all on your lonesome, I’ll fucking chain you up to make sure you ain’t ever disobeying me again. We all clear and dandy on that, cracklepan?” He jostles you so that you nearly fall over, and you hiss at his words. You don’t want to be chained, panic and deep-set fear of being held down waking up within you, but you don’t understand his sudden interest in keeping you hidden. Why should he care if sometroll saw you? It wasn’t like they were going to interact with a slave like yourself, at least not in any meaningful or particularly constructive way. He growls gutturally as he slams the door shut. “My brothers and sisters find you out there and you’re gonna be the next opening sermon for our Messiah. And trust this troll on his word, you ain’t wanting that my little sparklesponge, you ain’t wanting that at all, even though I know for a fucking fact that you all up and long to leave this life in a haste.”

He snarls and you think you can hear your bloodpusher beat in your ears. He’s going to cull you, he’s going to set you free, and you almost feel grateful before something else slams into you. Something you think you remember calling _regret_. But there’s no pain delivered except for when your knees hit the enormous resting platform, and you’re tossed up onto it. “No chainth. I’m not leaving.” You mutter this without raising your head, pan swimming with things you thought you’d forgotten by now, and you hear him take a step back.

“Nah, you ain’t. And no troll is going to give you what you want, you hear? I’m gonna fucking make sure you stay alive until I say otherwise.”

You almost hate him for it, but the frustrated growl in your throat sticks there as you swallow down all the things you want to scream at him. You shouldn’t bite it back, he’s always in a better mood once you’ve bitched at each other a little, sometimes he’s even downright civil towards you. That always makes you feel weird, in that certain kind of way that you know can destroy you if you look at it too closely. But today is full of things you thought you’d gotten rid of, everything is just a little bit blurry and confusing, and at times you’re not certain it’s greasepaint and Faygo you smell instead of seaweed and hair gel. So you say nothing, only curl up further on the platform, away from him and his strange ways of treating you, and try to remember the moons of Alternia. Try to remember what your lusus looked like, or what the night air felt like against your unmarred skin. Almost everything you try to bring up before your minds eye falls short and fades away as quickly as you thought about it.

Time slips away from you and you don’t realize that your custodian has been gone for a while until something hard is thrown down on the pillows beside you, and you glance over at the item curiously. It’s… a book?

“If you all up and want to jog that pan into remembrance, you ought to get schoolfed again. Ain’t no fucker in my hive going to be ignorant when the miracles of the Messiah are here to bless your pathetic existence.” The Grand Highblood rumbles, downing a swig of questionable green substance from a bottle before aiming a razor-sharp sneer your way.

You eye him suspiciously, and then look down to the item by your side, running your long fingers over the cover. It’s old, you think, and the texture of it startles your nerve endings. It feels foreign and a lot like something you shouldn’t have at all, but the text on the front page vexes you and you don’t know what to say. There’s a lost connection here, although you’d been perfectly fine with coding walls of different scripts while the ship was plugged into your wetware, which is you and _only_ you in your own husk with meat and bones and psionics, you are all but useless at this alone. The link between physically looking at text and translating it in your pan has diminished over the years and it’s with a tint of yellow over your cheekbones that you bitterly mutter out: “I can’t read. Not anymore.” You wonder idly if he knew that, and that this was only something he did to humiliate you.

The startled, almost angry sounding hiss that escapes between his dagger-like teeth tell you that no, he didn’t know. “You can’t motherfucking make the miraculous words come off the page? Shit, you’re more useless than a rustblooded wriggler.”

You snarl at that; it’s not your fault and he knows it. “Fuck you, bulgethucker. Do you think they wanted me to read them thtorieth while powering the ship? I _can’t_ read.” You shove the book away from you, a gesture that is almost physically painful for reasons you don’t know and don’t want to understand, and the air around you turns a fraction colder. You look up, baring your teeth. “What, you’re going to flip your shit jutht becauthe I can’t read your fairytaleth?” You’re pushing it, and the melancholia that had you in it’s uncaring embrace just moments ago force you to lower your head when he snarls, and a hasty: “Thorry.” is added to your sentence, as if your outburst could be taken back immediately.

“Are you so spongedamaged today that you can’t stand a motherfucking book?” His voice is strange, his whole stance his strange, and you don’t want to think about it. You don’t want to rely on this troll, he’s the Grand Highblood who was part of the demise of your friends, your palemate and your family, but he’s making your head spin every time he does something you can’t cope with. Better to react the way you always do, and be done with it. Some day soon, you’re going to try to kill him.

Not that you think you’ll make it, but he promised you that if you ever tried he’d tear you apart. Even if you do succeed, the punishment for culling a highblood is death. So for you it’s a twofold win-win situation. The best kind of situation really.

Suddenly the resting platform dips alarmingly to the side and you tumble headfirst into a cold shoulder, making you jerk back and growl but he doesn’t seem to mind. Instead that sickle-smile he has plastered on his face widens, and he laughs at your fight to get away from him. It’s fairly obvious that you’re not going anywhere and he hauls you close by the scruff of your neck, his claws scratching dangerously close to your jugular vein, and settles you by his side. Your cheeks burn in seething embarrassment, and sparks fly off your fingertips to scorch through the fabric of his pants, but he bats your hands away with a snort.

“Calm your horns, pissblood. The Messiah ain’t gonna grace your lousy life with sometroll like me, willing to fix your gogforsaken mess of a pan, any other time than the fucking present. You all up open those clogged ducts and listen to my wicked tunes.”

So you do. You sit perfectly still and listen to his odd voice as he reads the history of Alternia for you, too dumbstruck to do much else. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He was supposed to be mean, to beat the life out of you, and not grunt his way through the history of the bigger settlements of the Empire while taking sips from the green liquid he still has in the bottle next to him. The smell of paper and the very strange odor his hair exudes mix in your nose and before you actually understand what’s happening, you even try to pay attention to what he tries to teach you.

When he stops halfway through, snarling at you to be quiet and sit still, you figure it was just a fluke; he’d been high on sophor and now he’s coming around again, or he’d just done all this to fuck with your already messy pan. But he snaps his dangerous teeth at you a few horrifying times, before he rips off some fabric from the resting platform and awkwardly drapes it over you. You hadn’t even been aware that you’d been shuddering until the heavy and well-worn textile is tucked around your shoulders, but he seems to be very pleased by his incentive to make it stop and you manage the tiniest of grateful noises. Looking at you for a moment, he shifts his hold on you to make you both more comfortable, huffing through his nose as he deems it done. You just go along with this strange behavior, even though your ears are relaxing and growing warm. Although that’s easily blamed on the newly added warmth around you.

It kind of hurts dully somewhere in the middle of your chest, and even though you soak up everything you learn, you feel so _wrong_. You’re supposed to hate him. But, in this moment, you’re not sure you can. Not when he mutters out the patterns of the moons you asked about, not when he pauses to jab a claw into your ribs to make you splutter out the words he just read as if he really was your teacher and this was a test. You can’t even hate the way he looks so smug, so pleased with himself, when you forget to call him ‘mathter’.

And for the first time since you were taken from the helmsblock, you are okay with not hating anything for a little while.


End file.
